Virtual Reality's Uneven Experience: The Gender Discrepancy of Cybersickness

Category Engineering

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Iowa State researchers in psychology and engineering collaborated to explore why women experience cybersickness with virtual reality headsets more than men. Their research found that women experienced 40% more cybersickness and ended the game early twice as often as men. The second paper explored the distance between your pupils and had no bearing on the gender discrepancy. Women reported experiencing more motion sickness which increased their susceptiblity to experience cybersickness.


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Iowa State researchers in psychology and engineering found women experience cybersickness with virtual reality headsets more often than men. Their ongoing work explores why this difference exists and options to help individuals adapt.Psychology professor Jonathan Kelly studies human computer interaction, spatial cognition and virtual reality.

"But it's still a problem, and when VR gets to the point where it's a bigger part of job training or education in a classroom, it's even more important to make sure people can access this technology. If not, a lot of people are going to get left out, and there could be a backlash," says Kelly.

VR headsets have an adjustable lens set-up that can accommodate different users.

Like motion sickness, cybersickness can occur when there's a mismatch between visual motion and body motion. Symptoms, including nausea, dizziness, headaches and eye fatigue, usually resolve quickly after removing the headset. But in severe cases, they sometimes last for hours.

With ISU professor Michael Dorneich and associate professor Stephen Gilbert in industrial and manufacturing systems engineering, Kelly and his Ph.D. student, Taylor Doty, recently co-authored two related papers for the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference. The first paper provides an overview of existing research on gender and cybersickness, including their own findings.

The ISU research team was a collaboration of psychology and engineering professors.

As part of a larger study on adaptation to cybersickness, the ISU researchers recruited 150 participants to play up to 20 minutes of a VR game with a headset. The participants were new to VR and could stop if they felt too sick to continue. The researchers found women ended the game early twice as often as men and reported a sickness intensity that was 40%% higher.

The paper also helps clarify why previous studies, many of which came from engineering or computer science, show conflicting results.

Psychology professor Jonathan Kelly studies human computer interaction and spatial cognition.

"A lot of the older papers that found no difference in cybersickness between men and women had very small sample sizes or a large gender imbalance. If the effect is small or individual differences are large, you may need 200 participants to identify statistically significant differences," says Kelly. "I think this methodological expertise is something we in psychology can really provide. It also highlights the value of interdisciplinary collaboration to tackle complex problems like cybersickness." .

The study took place in a VR game with a guitar for up to 20 minutes.

For the second paper, the researchers explored whether the distance between an individual's pupils could help explain the gender difference in cybersickness. VR headsets have an adjustable lens set-up to accommodate different users, but some people fall outside the range. The researchers found women participants on average had smaller distances between their pupils than men, but it did not predict whether they would get cybersick during the game.

VR research is important for job training and education as it binds people together.

What seemed to matter more was whether they had previous experience with motion sickness or screen sickness (e.g., feeling sick in movie theaters, while playing a video game.) .

"Women reported experiencing more motion sickness and screen-based sickness than men, and this increased susceptibility is part of the reason that women experience more cybersickness," says Kelly.


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